Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College

Archaeological Institute of America lecturer and host Richard Lobban, Jr. (Ph.D., Northwestern) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College, where he taught since 1972. At RIC, Professor Lobban is also the Executive Director of the Sudan Studies Association and was Director of the Program of African and Afro-American Studies for nearly thirteen years. He has been engaged in African studies since 1964, when he first went to Africa. Professor Lobban spent two years on the research staff at the American University in Cairo and has taught in Khartoum, Sudan, as well as in the U.S. at the University of Pittsburgh, Tufts, Bucknell, and Dartmouth. He lived in the Nile valley for six years and conducted his own ethnographic fieldwork in Arabic. Recently, he received an excavation license for a continuing archaeological project in Sudanese Nubia, with colleagues from Rome and Moscow, at the Meroitic site of Abu Erteila which was recently reported in the New York Times.

Professor Lobban is a past-President of the Narragansett Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, and endowed an AIA lecture series that focuses on the archaeology of Africa. He has published and lectured widely on the archaeology, history, languages, and cultures of Africa, especially on the Nile valley societies and on Nubia in particular. Among his published works is the Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia. University courses he has taught include comparative language and writing systems, rise of the state in the Egypto-Nubian valley, ethnoarchaeology of ancient Nubia, and anthrozoology along the Nile. Professor Lobban has run and organized tours through Egypt and Sudan for more than twenty years, including annual departures of the AIA’s Egyptian Odyssey since 2009 for which he has received excellent reviews, and he brings a broad perspective to our in-depth tour that will complement that of our excellent local Egyptologist guide.